Wendy Alane Adams shows off the first two books of her Legends of Orkney series, “The Red Sun” and “The Moon Pearl.” The part-time Chapman accounting professor has written several books, including one that's been published, “The Red Sun,” book one of six in her “Legends of Orkney” novel series for young adult readers.

Author Alane Adams uses several white boards to write down ideas for her fantasy world in her Legends of Orkney book series.

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Alane Adams stands next to a promotional poster for “The Red Sun,” the first book in her Legends of Orkney series. Adams also teaches accounting at Chapman.

“The Coal Thief” was a Christmas gift for her father, who used to steal coal from trains in Pennsylvania with his father.

Wendy Alane Adams with schoolchildren in Peru in 2011. The children learned how to use her iPad within seconds.

Wendy Alane Adams always wanted to be a writer, but it didn’t seem practical.

Originally from Whittier, Adams ultimately majored in business, graduated from USC in 1983, got her certified public accountant license and went to New York to work for two years as an accountant at the World Trade Center.

“Accounting is another type of storytelling,” said Adams, a part-time Chapman University accounting teacher. “Financials tell a story about a company. Whether you’re working with numbers or working with words, it’s about being able to turn things around in your mind and make something out of it.”

These days, Adams has been indulging in the more traditional kind of storytelling. Under her pen name Alane Adams, she’s written several books, including one that’s been published, “The Red Sun,” book one of six in her “Legends of Orkney” novel series for young adult readers.

Moreover, she’s brought all aspects of herself together, pouring all of her experiences – being a businesswoman, teaching, writing, motherhood, earning her master’s degree in diplomacy three years ago, serving on nonprofit boards and traveling to several developing countries with UNICEF – into the Rise Up Foundation, which works to improve the lives of impoverished children through literacy.

“Lack of literacy contributes to some of the greatest problems that we have,” Adams said. A common factor of kids in juvenile hall or adults in prison is a low reading level, she said.

Her journey back to California from New York City took her on a six-month adventure around the world to Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and Thailand. Then her brother called and told her the family chief financial officer had quit. He asked her to come home to be the CFO for the family’s Santa Ana metal recycling business, SA Recycling LLC, which she now owns with her brothers.

She worked there for about 20 years, retired in 2008 and founded her nonprofit.

“I wanted to do other things with my life,” she said. She also wanted to teach, though she never taught before, and start writing again.

The foundation in Old Towne Orange, walking distance to Chapman, is fueled by income from the family business and proceeds from her book sales. The book, which retails for $9.95 at Amazon.com and elsewhere, has sold 4,000 copies so far.

She hopes the book will bring in even more money once it’s re-edited and released under her Rodina Press publishing company.

The Rise Up Foundation supports teachers across the country by buying them new books for their libraries and classrooms. Her foundation does a lot of work through DonorsChoose.org, a site where teachers post what they need. Rise Up selects literacy projects in high-poverty areas.

“We try to close projects,” she said. For example, if a project has $98 to go, Rise Up will fund the remaining amount. More recently, Rise Up has been funding three to five literacy projects a day. So far, it’s funded 308 projects.

Adams also visits schools once a week to talk with students about books and writing.

“What I keep finding is: Where are all those bad teachers you hear about in the press?” she said.

Writing fantasy books is her creative balm.

In almost three years, she’s written four of the six books in her “Legends of Orkney” series and plans to start book five after Christmas. She just started a series of fantasy books for girls. Writing 1,000 words a day every day, it should take 80 days to write a book, she said.

“When I’m writing, I write every day,” she said.

Her father was the inspiration for her children’s picture book, “The Coal Thief,” illustrated by Cal State Fullerton alumna Lauren Gallegos, which will be released next year under her Rodina Press.

Rodina means “family” in Czech. Her father, 93, grew up in Pennsylvania and is from the former European country of Czechoslovakia. “So much of everything I’ve done has been about family,” she said.

The story is based on Adams’ father’s experience stealing coal from trains with his father. She gave the book to her father last Christmas. After getting some editorial feedback – “You know you really can’t have a father stealing coal with his son” – she changed the story a bit.

Being an accountant, she uses a spreadsheet to track her writing progress.

“Don’t laugh at me because this is silly,” she said, pulling up her spreadsheet on the computer and, sure enough, there are a variety of silly smiley-face emoticons that express her mood and mark each time she reaches 5,000 words.

“There’s something about getting a little smiley face,” she said. “That’s how I keep myself structured.”

If there is such thing as the creative right brain and the logic- and numbers-oriented left brain, both sides of her brain reign.

“I can thrive in both and enjoy both of them, but ultimately where I’m happiest is in this creative realm,” she said.

Adams went the self-publishing route after a whirl with traditional publishers.

“I bounced around with the traditional publishing world. I really pursued it and decided it was way too frustrating and non-productive, and it wasn’t any fun. I wanted the writing to be fun. I wanted this journey to be fun. Life is short,” she said.

“There’s a certain amount of serendipity that comes from books that get accepted,” she said. “Well, all of that has really changed today, now that we’ve broken down the barrier of entry.”

Self-publishing also gives her control of marketing and the use of her creative material. She plans to expand her storytelling across a variety of media including video and video games.

“My work here is trying to create an impact on literacy,” she said.

Though she self-publishes, she still uses professional children’s book editors to edit her books.

“Editing is the most important part. No writer on their own can create a finished product,” she said. “I want to take away any question mark that it isn’t as good as any other book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble.”

She started writing the Orkney series nearly three years ago for the youngest of her three sons, Alex, now 14. He was 12 when he challenged her to write a book that he would like to read. He was a fan of author Rick Riordan’s “Percy Jackson & the Olympians” series, full of Greek mythology.

“That’s kind of the way my brain works, the relentless kind of a brain. I try to become an expert on something if I don’t know a lot about it,” she said. “What evolved from that was the most incredible experience that I’ve had as a mother because he and I would go to Starbucks and spend hours talking about the story.”

She and her son crafted the book together, creating the magical world of Orkney. The lead character, Sam, a 12-year-old boy, is modeled after her son. It’s her son who is on the book’s cover.

“He was a muse and an accountability partner,” she said.

She’s taking a social entrepreneur approach to the release of her books. The more books she sells, the more funds she has to donate books to classrooms. “It’s a lot of fun because everything finally makes sense,” she said. “I get to do all the things I love to do,” she said.

“I’ve been teaching for five years now. I understand what it takes to create impact in the classroom,” she said.

“This is me firing on all pistons.”

Creating change

Adams taught accounting full time at Chapman University for four years beginning in 2009, and she developed and taught a class on social entrepreneurship – “the idea that you can do good and do well, that you can create a sustainable social impact of some kind.”

One of the best examples of social entrepreneurship is microfinancing, she said. Instead of giving a woman in Kenya $100, if you lend her $100, she can create her business and from that income, she can pay back the loan with interest.

Microfinance is a multibillion-dollar industry started by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for introducing the microfinance model to the developing world.

She started teaching the course and trying to understand: Why is the world the way it is? Why is the world so broken? Why is endemic poverty such a part of our everyday life? “The only way to really understand the world is to go out and see it,” she said.

“You get an appreciation for what people struggle with in the developing world, not having access to clean water and being in villages where they don’t have access to modern medicine.”

She traveled with children’s advocacy group UNICEF to developing countries such as Angola and Laos on 10-day trips. She visited schools of all kinds, a circle of chairs under a tree, a dirt floor and wooden bench, schools on wheels and schools in Angola with science labs.

“As long as you have a teacher,” she said.

Many of the students she met want to be teachers, she said. The teacher and the ability to read represent an “escape out.”

She took her iPad to a remote village in Peru. “It took them all of 30 seconds to figure how to use my iPad.” She had just come from the Galapagos Islands and she had photos of all sorts of animals from her trip. “Now imagine you’re a child from a remote village in Peru and you’ve never seen a platypus or a dolphin or a turtle.”

The usual way to think of humanitarian work is giving aid, shelter and food, she said. But to create long-lasting change, it’s necessary to affect governments, she said.

When she was in Nepal in 2012, the country’s government set a goal of a 100 percent sanitation rate by 2017. “In the background what nobody really saw was the work that UNICEF was doing to help draft the legislation and help the parliament come up with the wording,” she said.

“Creating movements within governments has an impact. Affecting policymakers is really the only way to make long-term sustainable change,” she said.

“That’s one those things that I was able to learn in my travels.”

Traveling, along with earning her master’s degree in diplomacy in 2011 from Norwich University, a military school in Vermont, has influenced her nonprofit work.

“I came away with all that, with a better understanding of the world.”

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